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The Side RoomOff topic chat about pretty much anything other than music. Try to be respectful. Strong debate is welcomed, insults and trolling are not. This area is for over 18's only and may occasionally contain NSFW material, although it's not encouraged.

I've always avoided 3rd party styluses... what cartridge did you get a stylus from them for?

I have a bunch of carts here... stanton 500... an Excel... an old and a newer Shure M95ed.... Sc35c, Ortofon Lm30, Empire mkVI...various Audio Technicas... others. I'm so tempted to throw cash at this because it makes such a huge difference. But some youtubers seem to have had bad experiences with third party suppliers...

Currently using a pair of good ol' m44-7. There is quite a few fairly revealing comparative tests out there from people who take the time to properly set things up and my conclusion, so far, is that it's hard to find a significantly better sounding cart that you can back-cue with, independently of cost.

I've always avoided 3rd party styluses... what cartridge did you get a stylus from them for?

I thought Shibata is just a stylus type (I suppose they are a manufacturer too, sorry for the confusion), like sperical or elliptical, it's the next step up. It has an even pointier bottom so it reaches deeper into the groove, originally designed to extract the rear speaker info for quad setups by tracking frequencies up to 40khz and sending them through a divider for the rear channel, as I understand. In stereo, however, that means much more linear frequency response all the way out beyond your hearing and it goes deeper in the groove, so for old records you can get better quality if they've only been played with spherical or elliptical styli, and less distortion.

I have an AT120E that came on my table, but I didn't know how to set my counterweight at first and I bent the original needle, so I bought an AT140ML stylus (ML being microline, with is the AT equivalent of a Shibata). When I got mine, they weren't so outrageous, I spent $120 for the stylus, now I think they're close to $200.

Check out the link, I'm pretty sure you can buy a stylus type that gets even closer to A there, but I don't even know what it's called. I only have a middle of the road shibata type (I went for nude diamond, but I couldn't afford to spring for a boron cantilever or even more exotic materials) and I can't really justify going to a more advanced stylus without first getting better speakers and some room treatment.